As noted last time, I had a secondary backlog to deal with in this Operation: Backlog project; my collection of Humble Bundles that I’ve gathered over the years. It turns out that there were about 60 games I had tucked away in their system that hadn’t been added to my Steam list. So, I went through and bulked up my library. There are a few that were part of these bundles that were included, but that I’ll never play, like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Penumbra Overture (I very strongly dislike horror games, but hey, if that’s your thing, they do show up in bundles here and there), but there are still more than a few that will get the 15-minute treatment as I’ve done before.

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I’m going through my Steam list alphabetically, picking up games I own but haven’t played to see what’s there. 15 minutes each is all I’m budgeting, but I reserve the right to get sucked into a cool game. Some I’ve played already, though, so I’ll mention them in passing here and there, giving them a rating like the other games.

I’ll be giving each of these Backlog games a rating of sorts, as follows: Regret (uninstall and forget), Remember (uninstall but wish for more time), Revisit (leave installed for later) and Recommend (wish for more time to play this right now). This is a squishy continuum of sorts, and deliberately imprecise. This isn’t an in depth survey-and-review, it’s Spring Cleaning of my video game backlog.

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Since I’m dealing with a new influx of games, I’ve gone back to pick up the ones I skipped over in the alphabetical list. First up is Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers.

I’m just not a flight sim fan. I’d rather play something like Privateer or Freelancer, out in space with a bit of whimsy. Air Conflicts is a historical combat flight simulator built around carriers in the Pacific theater, specifically in the second World War. You can fly for Japan or the U.S., piloting planes that look decent over terrain and ships that look decent. I have little idea whether or not they are meticulously accurate to real history, but the visuals look good overall.

The play is what I’d consider to be an “arcadey” combat flight sim. It’s not a cartoony flight game like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (we’ll get to that later) or Pilotwings (those were the days), but it’s not really trying to be a hardcore simulation of flying these planes. I’m OK with that, since flying real planes can be a very complex procedure sometimes, from what I understand.

Just speaking to how fun the game is on its own, though, flying around is fun enough, though I’m just not very good at the combat portion. Controls are decent if a bit “floaty” and imprecise. Stuff blows up nicely. The sounds serve their purpose well. There are different options to play, from a campaign to Instant Battle, which was nice to just jump into.

I don’t have any big complaints other than just the simple fact that this isn’t my sort of game. It’s not a bad game, it’s just one that I have no interest in playing again. I’d be the sort that just flies around the arena, looking for screenshot opportunities. I just don’t follow orders well, and I’d get tired of being shot at.

I’d say I Regret this game, but really, it’s not something I paid much for, since it was part of a bundle. I had a bit of fun with it, but it’s not one I’ll play again. If arcadey flight sim WW2 games are your thing, it should be good.

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Then, in a significant shift, I tried And Yet It Moves. I used my XBox 360 controller for this one. It’s a quirky platformer which lets you rotate the world. This relatively simple concept changes a lot of how you move through the world, and I find that I’m rather fond of the twist. The controller makes it easier to sort the controls intuitively, which is important.

The visuals are unique and consistent, though it’s not quite the sort of style I’m really fond of. Still, I give them credit for staying true to their vision and really embracing their design.

Controls are decent (though the character feels a little floaty and doesn’t jump all that high), platforming around is good fun, and learning how to handle the world (and your character’s motion) is a nice change from something like Braid, which, for all its time-bending gameplay, is still relatively static.

I give this one a Revisit rating because I probably won’t play much of it, since Dust fills my platformer impulse at the moment, but AYIM is a solid little game. If you’re into platformers with some thoughtful design, it’s a good one to check out.

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Anomaly 2 is the next game I tried. I have the first one around here somewhere, probably from a non-Humble bundle, but now I can’t find it. I’ll just pretend that the two are more or less designed similarly, and hope that’s right. “More of the same, but better” isn’t a bad thing, and Anomaly 2 should offer at least some idea of what both titles have to offer. They are “tower offense” games, where you’re not controlling the towers to defend against enemies as in tower defense games (GemCraft, Defense Grid, etc.), you’re assaulting the bad guy towers with your squad and commander.

That’s enough to Recommend the game if you’re a fan of tower defense games. If you’re just looking into the game with no particular interest in the genre, know that it looks really good, controls are excellent, and the core design is solid. Your commander usually has to stick with your squad, escorting them through hot zones and making the most of their abilities to finish missions, though you can wander off if you consider the reward to be worth the risk.

Different units and layouts mean finding ways to stay on your toes and keep on top of the tactical situation. It can get a little twitchy at times, but it rewards fast thinking and situational awareness rather than just reflex tests, and I appreciate that. I find that I don’t mind needing to execute fast controls at times if I have enough time to anticipate them well, and Anomaly 2 works well for that.

One quirk is that each unit can “morph” between two different forms. They have different abilities, like the first unit which changes from a tank with a killer cannon into a two-armed flamethrower “urban warfare” unit that can target multiple foes. Juggling the morph states gives your six-unit squad more flexibility and keeps things from getting too repetitive.

It’s a game that is great for fans of the tower defense genre, and I think it would be good even if you’re new to the genre. I really like the time I spent with it, about 25 minutes, and would someday like to play more. The game eases you into its design and has multiple difficulty settings for a variety of players. It’s easily one of the better games I’ve played in this project.

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Aquaria was up next. I’m pretty sure I have this at least three times from different bundles. It’s a pretty game with a good sense of style, good voice work, good music and decent controls.

It’s really nice to be able to just swim in any direction, though Naija doesn’t turn as quickly as I’d like. She feels a little… floaty… which is odd, perhaps, for a mermaid, but still, moving her around is nicely freeform, just a bit imprecise and sluggish feeling. She has the ability to sing songs that help her in what I assume are various ways. The only one she starts with is Shield, which didn’t actually seem to shield all that much.

The reviews I’ve read of this bill it as a Metroidvania game, and it does feel a bit like Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (another such game, and a good one). It’s really, really slow to start off, though. It’s rather fond of its narration, but I just wanted to get on with the game. Metroid Prime spoiled me on that, I guess. There’s a good Reddit thread on it over here.

Perhaps it gets better and more interesting down the line, and a slow start does fit the ambient lackadaisical sort of mood they seem to want to evoke, it’s just… it doesn’t show all that well in the first 15 minutes. If that was all I played, I’d have to give it a Regret rating. As it is, I played for about 25 minutes, and eventually found a sort of “combat flashforward preview” thing which hinted that the game might get more interesting, so I’ll Remember it and move on.

This game, more than others I’ve played in this project so far, seems to suffer the most from a slow start. It was easier to get away with this in days long past, but in today’s more saturated market with more ADHD customers (and/or just time-starved like me), your game has to make an accurate and good impression as soon as possible. It’s just not as likely that customers are going to play for 3 hours before your game gets good. We don’t have time for that. Get to the point, developers! Even if it’s a tease like Metroid Prime, where you’re given lots of toys to play with up front, but then you lose them and have to find them again, players will know in short order what the game has to offer later, all within a few minutes. Even the super-dense Endless Legend makes a quick good impression, and they have more depth and play options to get through.

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Atom Zombie Smasher isn’t a game I’d buy on its own, but since it came with a bundle, I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s… not a typical zombie game. It’s more of a Real Time Strategy game with minimalistic visuals. That’s not a bad thing in itself, and it certainly cuts down on the cliche gore that zombies usually show off. You try to protect little yellow dots (humans) from little pink dots (zombies) in a city, using a variety of weapons from your “eye in the sky” tactical view.

It could really be about any two groups of things where one tries to escape the other. The theme isn’t strong, but that’s OK. The gameplay is solid, and that’s more important to me anyway. The art style, simple as it is, is consistent and clear.

That yellow dot on the right is not going to come to a good end.

Send in a chopper to save yellow dots, protect them with green dots (soldiers who fire on pink dots within range/sight), maybe use some land mines or artillery (remember that explosives can open new avenues for pink dots), and maybe even some pink-proof barriers.

Those land mines leveled buildings that could have kept the pink dots controlled a bit.

It’s a solid game, one I’ll Remember. If you’re into RTS or zombie games, it’s worth picking up and playing for a while.

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aaaaand that’s it for this time. I’m still not through the secondary backlog, but should get through it next time.

Thanks again for stopping by, and here’s hoping you have time to dig through your list. There are a LOT of great games out there, and tons of good ones. It’s a good time to be a gamer.

I’ve played video games since Bowling on the Atari 2600 back in 1980. I’ve played on most major consoles here in the U.S. (the Neo Geo is the one I skipped… that thing was stupidly expensive, though I loved some of its games in the arcades of the day), though I’m still stuck in the PS3/XB360 era due to lack of funding. I’ve played PC and Mac games, from simple DOS games like Sleuth up through Star Control 2 and The Dig, and later, Batman: Arkham Asylum (I know, it’s a port, but it’s my most graphically intensive PC game) and Minecraft.

I discovered a taste for design in the Dark Castle days, drawing out new levels on graph paper. I further refined my interest in mechanics when I did some serious work designing a world and game systems for a RPG in the King’s Quest days, though it wound up being more of a Final Fantasy Tactics sort of game. I really, really wanted to make a good sequel to Chrono Trigger, and made many notes on what I’d do. Chrono Cross, great game that it is, just didn’t scratch the same itch.

I’ve always enjoyed games, both playing and designing. In many ways, creating new games is more satisfying, since I’m a creative sort and would rather produce than consume.

My BFA is in Computer Animation, and while some of my classmates have worked for Pixar, Rhythm and Hues, Blue Sky, Dreamworks and Weta, I wound up in the game industry. I’d have loved working at Pixar making Disney films, like I planned to do as a kid, but circumstances led to other choices. I still love animating, though I’m most experienced at modeling, texturing and solving weird tech issues, since I’m a “Technical Artist”, comfortable with tech and art.

I worked for Headgate Studios, largely working on EA’s Tiger Woods games. Then I worked at Wahoo Studios, making a few Kefling games along with a smattering of other projects both internal and contract work. I have a list around here somewhere of the 15 or so games I am credited in, which qualifies me as a veteran of sorts. That said, as is so often true, time and economics caught up with me, and I’m now “retired” from the industry after almost a decade working on the art in games, with a bit of dabbling in design.

Anyway, I’m in between serious contracts, and while I’m scrambling for something new to pay the bills, I have a few minutes here and there. So, given that I’ve been collecting games over the years, adding to my Steam collection and assorted game bundles, I have more than a few games to fill that time with.

So, I’m going to be systematic about it and just start plowing through my game backlog. I’m going to give each game 15 minutes to really grab me, then do a quick writeup of what happened, probably with a screenshot or two, and with some commentary about the design and art. Pith may be present. I might revisit the games, but I probably won’t. Still, I want to do a bit of exploration. It’s good to see what’s out there, and how other games are designed.

I’ll post those writeups here, though I’m not committing to any regular schedule or format. Perhaps this is the sort of thing YouTube is for, but I hate being in videos and hearing myself. Writing, that I can do. We’ll see how it all settles out.

I know, I know, some games really need more than 15 minutes to get a proper shakedown, but, well, I can’t be the only one who only barely has time to graze games. I could devote dozens of hours to the latest Final Fantasy when I was in high school, but these are different times. I think it’s a good game design that has the ability to do something to earn further attention within those 15 minutes. I simply won’t be doing some games justice, but that’s life in this saturated, cutthroat market. There are still lessons to be learned, I think.

See you next time with a bit of commentary on what I’ve been playing, then I’ll mostly shelve those games and start trekking through the wilds.

OK, not so much “morbid” as… depressed, but that would have killed the alliteration.

For a little bit of context, I was laid off or downsized from the video game company I worked for just about two months ago. It’s been… stressful. Really stressful. It’s part of why I haven’t posted here for a while.

For a bit more context, there’s this fellow’s insanely large video game collection that hit the news:

It’s a decent article, but I wanted to chase down a couple of implications that they didn’t get to, and tie a few things together.

As might be noted by the Kotaku article, or by speaking with veterans of the industry, there is a lot of churn in the video game production world. Staffing woes aren’t uncommon in many industries, so it’s not like we’re super special snowflakes or anything, but it’s worth noting that the industry isn’t a stable one. It’s a wildly profitable one on the whole, an entertainment medium that isn’t going away, but it’s not financially stable, nor is a career in the industry going to be a stable one.

I read an article a while back (though I can’t find it now), and this thread seems to echo the same thoughts, that careers in the video game industry are short on average. As in, five years short, or about two big game dev cycles. It’s true that we don’t live in a world where you get one job right out of college and stay at it until you retire or die, so again, this isn’t all that unusual, but it’s somewhat sobering. Or it should be.

I’ve worked in the industry for almost ten years. I’m an old hand at it, in some ways. That’s… weird. (Not as old of a hand as some, but still, it’s weird to think of myself as statistically over the hill, career wise.)

Anyway, this does have effects on the industry beyond what the Kotaku article notes. Because companies are always fluctuating around, “redistributing assets” and such, there are convenient excuses to drop older, more expensive employees and pick up fresh meat from colleges. The passion in these younger, unattached employees (mostly male) is exceptionally easy to exploit, as I’ve railed against before, and as the EA Spouse kerfluffle illustrated all too well. Conditions haven’t improved much since then, though some managers do a good job. Death marches and crunch might be the backbone of a production schedule, but they aren’t healthy.

Tangentially, this explains a fair bit of the “boys’ club” mentality of the industry, for those of you who are up in arms about Blizzard’s recent public relations black eyes. People who grow up (and actually mature, unlike the ESRB’s definition of the word) and want stable careers for their families don’t last long in the industry.

This is part of why the indie scene is important, as veteran developers try out new ideas that would never fit into the studio or megaentertainment company mentality. Games are an important artistic medium, but they are hobbled by the realities of the industry. Indies are opening up the scope of the medium, but like so many artistic avenues, it’s not really a solid career choice.

I could get bitter about this, but really, I’m just noting the realities of the industry as a voice of… not warning, exactly, since I still see great value in games. It’s more of a voice of pragmatism. The industry is not a place for long term stability (relevant to those who wish to make games), it’s not a place for actual maturity (relevant to devs and gamers), and it’s not going away.

I’ve been applying to studios around the world, but have no real leads. I may well be out of the “official” video game world now, more or less “retired” by circumstance, and left to do indie games with friends on the side as I scramble for other work, whether freelance art or some other art position somewhere. Again, this isn’t a desirable position to be in, but it’s not too surprising or unique. I’m disappointed, but then, as I noted in that NBI article, I believe that a job or career is just something you do to pay the bills so you can afford to do what you really want to do in your spare time. I don’t have anything yet, but even if I pick up a new video games job, I can’t really see myself in the industry for decades, just because of how it works.

I’ll work on indie games because they interest me. I’ll make my Shapeways, Zazzle, Kickstarter and other projects because I just can’t stop creating. I may well wind up with a completely irrelevant job, but games, art and creativity are something I will always be involved in.

But… yeah… I’m busier now than I ever have been, working hard on a lot of different things, but making very little money. This blog, as great as it is to write here, isn’t my priority. I’ll be here now and then again, still, I’m not closing shop, I’m just busy. Really busy. I’m updating my portfolio (seen over here), working on my own projects (novels, games, art, photography, all sorts of things) and looking for freelance opportunities. If any of you have leads, I’d certainly love to hear about them.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, I tend to think the ears are… um… also important. More for the intake than the output, obviously. So… doors, maybe? Anyway…

Good music does good things for people.

No, I’m not talking about sappy hippy gunk like Lennon’s Imagine (can’t stand that song) or celebrities pontificating about Christmas in third world nations and whining about first worldproblems on their day off, no, I’m talking about music that doesn’t set out to preach. I’m talking about music that sets out to entertain and maybe uplift. I see it as something akin to Walt Disney’s famous quote:

…as in, I’m looking at music that just starts out to entertain, and if it happens to feed the soul or teach something along the way, that’s a bonus.

Anyway, I suppose I blame Syp and Syl for this, somewhat. They share good music clips here and there, so it gave me the itch to do the same. (Should I change my name to Syh or something to fit the mold better? Decisions, decisions…)

Most of the music I listen to while working or at home is from video game soundtracks. Occasionally I’ll splash something like Daft Punk’s TRON Legacy soundtrack in there (really good! …but how is putting the whole soundtrack online legit?), but it’s mostly game music. Convenient, then, that I work in the game industry, perhaps. Some of my favorites are as follows:

Mirror’s Edge, a quirky first person Parkour platformer, has a great theme song thisaway, titled Still Alive:

Which, of course, should not be confused with Portal‘s Still Alive song, which is also really good, but very different.

Bastion, a great little game, has a wonderful soundtrack. It’s different from the laid-back sort of music I usually prefer, but it just hits the spot when I’m looking for something a bit more adventurous. There’s the great Terminal March

I don’t play Skyrim, but this makes me want to. Sorta. I know, the game won’t let me be a killer violin-wielding bard or a chanting Viking, and it’s M-rated, which I avoid, but… that’s some good, stirring music.

Oh, and for the next 7 hours or so, the Humble Bundle guys have another great bundle up… and they are including the soundtracks. This is a fantastic move, and I hope we see more of this in the future. That’s how I got the Bastion and Swords & Sorcery soundtracks, which were each worth the price of the bundle alone, never mind all the other yummy goodness in each bundle. Games? Who has time to play those? The soundtracks, though, I can listen to while I do something else.

Kingdom Hearts is a favorite series of mine, ever since it was announced and I said “wait, er, what?” to the bizarre but fanboy dream pairing of Disney and SquareSoft. Y’see, I grew up wanting to be a Disney animator (and I could have worked into a Pixar job, but I won’t work in California), and played a fair dose of SquareSoft (now SquareEnix) games in my teens. My cultural DNA is infused with Disney and SquareSoft, so the pairing of the two just fit for me. It helps that the games are pretty fun. The first piece of music I heard was in the teaser trailer for the game, and I’ve been a fan of Yoko Shimomura’s work since. It’s a delightful mix of an orchestral score and Disney-flavored whimsy.

I would be remiss not to mention Nobuo Uematsu while we’re talking Squaresoft. He is brillant, even though he’s turning to the dark side in his old age *coughOtherworldBlackMagescough*. Dear Friends is an oldie but a goodie, though even better on the N Generation CD.

Speaking of SquareSoft, I’m a big fan of Yasunori Mitsuda’s work on Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. The OCRemix (a great resource, by the way) fan compilation “Chrono Symphonic” is also really good. My music appreciation gained a lot of depth staring with this ticking clock.

…and Frog’s Theme still makes me smile. Repetitive as it is, thanks to the nature of game music, it’s still a rousing theme for one of my favorite game heroes.

… but when I really need something to make my day better almost instantly, I often turn to Radical Dreamers (Chrono Cross OST, Yasunori Mitsuda). The whole 3-CD soundtrack is excellent, Scars of Time perfectly sets the mood (it plays during the game’s intro cinematic)

There’s a lot here in this industry to value. Even if it sometimes takes a distant back seat to the other trappings of modern gaming. There’s a lot of eye candy for those windows to the soul… and a lot of ear candy, too, for… um… whatever portal they are.

My generous employer, Wahoo Studios/NinjaBee, gave each of us an OnLive miniconsole for Christmas and a coupon for a game. They are one of those rare workplaces that actually wants its employees to play games… albeit not actually at work (QA crew excepted, of course) for sensible reasons.

I got Arkham City for $1 thanks to a promotion for new accounts they were running. Can’t argue much with that. Probably a fluke of timing, but hey, maybe they will do that again.

A decent selection of older games for the $9.99/month subscription plan. For that, you can play any game on the list as long as you’re subbed. If you’re a fan of subscription services and games, it’s probably a pretty good deal.

Small footprint. The games all run on remote servers, so the client is little and fast.

Digital library. All the advantages and downsides of that, as with Steam and its ilk. In a nutshell, they track and host the data for you, but your data is in their hands.

Nice tech crutch. You really only need a good internet connection and a screen to play on. The hard parts of staying on the cutting edge of gaming, the expensive hardware rigs, are covered by the OnLive guys. This is a pretty cool idea.

Cons:

You need a really good internet connection. As in, 3mbps minimum and low ping of 25ms or so. Those are somewhat pricey beasts, and if you’re in a remote area with third rate ISPs, you’re just out of luck. If you’re getting one just for gaming, the cost/value ratio changes a bit.

You need a HDTV-capable display. I use my computer monitor since I don’t have a HDTV, and since it’s a plain old 4:3 screen, the widescreen HDTV content is bordered by black on top and bottom. (The bars don’t actually bother me, but they might bug some players.) Maybe you already have a spiffy HDTV, but if not, those are pricey beasts, too.

Because it really needs another bullet point, you need a really good internet connection. Lagspikes will kill your gaming. Low speeds will kill your gaming. ISPs that are interruptable by phone calls will kill your gaming if anyone uses the phone.

Demos only last 30 minutes, but they are time-limited, not content limited, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not, as I’ve noted before, so I list this as a con, tempered by the realization that you can play the demo over and over, it just resets your play.

Somewhat underwhelming library. I suppose this will get better over time, so I can’t count this too harshly, but at the moment, they don’t seem to have a huge selection of games. It’s decent, but it’s not comprehensive.

Other:

I got Dirt3 with my gift coupon. It’s a solid, fun rally racing game, but about the only other one on the service that I even partially cared about. OK, Bastion is on there, and I will get that someday, but I prefer to get it on the XBox, ditto with the LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean. The library of games they offer isn’t very big at the moment, but I imagine it will get bigger. Since I don’t buy or play M-rated games, that naturally cut me off from a quarter or so of what they offer, too, but that’s a limitation on my end, not theirs.

…but what about the performance? How does it play?

Well… it’s geared to make the play more important than the visuals. As in, if the lagmonster strikes and you lose some speed on your internet connection, the visuals degrade instead of the play response, at least, as much as possible. You’ll see artifacting that you’d see in a JPG still frame or MPEG videos; blocky, blurry, smudgy visuals. This will be flatly intolerable for some players, but I actually didn’t mind it as much as I thought I would. This is partially because of how I play and the two games I have.

Y’see, Batman’s Arkham City is a grungy, dystopic place, beautiful in its decay in a terrible sort of way, not unlike the photos of Detroit’s urban decay that I noted a while back. It’s great to just look at… but a lot of the gameplay of Arkham City is about moving from place to place and beating up thugs. A fair chunk of it is played in “Detective Vision” as well. As such, when I want to take a look at the scenery, I just stop and look. The system doesn’t need as much processing or communication power when you’re stationary in the world, so the visuals improve when you stop to look around… which is a nice confluence of circumstances. When I’m fighting, the important part is seeing the motion and UI cues for counters, and those are perfectly serviceable, even if the overall visuals degrade a bit. When I’m soaring around town looking for stuff, I’m sure I’m missing some details, but for the most part, the sense of motion is key, and that translates pretty well unless there’s a very strong and/or protracted lagspike.

Dirt3 has similar quirks. As in, the bulk of the play is in the middle third of the screen, and there’s a speed blur effect around the perimeter anyway. It’s all about control, and as long as that stays tight, the game plays really well. On the longer Rally races, you have a couple of assists in driving anyway, like automatic gearshifting, a radio caller to tell you what turns are coming up, and a ghostly green “optimal race line” overlaid on the track to follow. Of course, these are optional, and I’m playing in Easy mode, so I’m not sure how well a purist hardcore gearhead (I use that term affectionately, not derogatorily) would like it. For me, though, it plays about as smooth as slightly sugary butter, which is a key component of fudge, so I’m happy with it. When I’ve missed a turn or botched a move, it always feels like my fault, not the game lagging on me. (I’m still not really good at dirt track racing, and the Gymkhanathing, heavy on the drifting and precision control, is very cool, but beyond me at the moment. It’s like trying to steer a cinder block on ice with turbo-powered hamster wheels.)

So… color me at least partially impressed with what the OnLive people have been able to do with the tech. I do still think that the high speed internet requirement will make it a niche product, but with luck, as the tech gets better, it will be more useful to more people. It’s not a perfect system, but it really is playable, which is more than I expected initially.

And hey, I’m playing a sweet driving game, Dirt3, and the so-far-phenomenal Arkham City, and I’ve only spent $1, not counting the computer or internet costs (I’m not using the miniconsole, though, without a HDTV… maybe I’ll come back and review that someday). I can’t complain much about that, either. Yes, there’s still that blasted internet tether, but for the price, I’m pretty happy.

I actually wish MMOs would take a page from the OnLive pipeline, too. I don’t mind if the visuals compress a little bit as long as the play stays at peak. I know, the tech is different, but I can’t help but wish that there were a similar on-the-fly tradeoff in MMOs to allow play to stay sharp, even if the data transfer rate isn’t constantly snappy.

I’m a gamer. I define that as “a guy who plays games for fun”. Some might define it as “I play video games for a living”, or “video games are my hobby” or “I simulate wars with little action figures and dice” or “my life is meaningless without video games” or even “I spend all my welfare check on slot machines”. It’s a very fluid term. For me, games are something I play in my few bits of free time, just one option among many ways to spend my time. There are a lot of different reasons to play, though.

Sometimes I want to be intellectually challenged. This is when I’ll play a Professor Layton game, Brain Age, Portal, Cogs or Safecracker… something in that vein. I enjoy a mental workout and the joy that comes with figuring something out.

Sometimes I merely want to be entertained. This is when I’ll play LEGO Batman with my kids, Arkham Asylum/City, Audiosurf, Rock of Ages, A World of Keflings, or World of Goo (or maybe an Uncharted if I had a PS3).

Sometimes I just want to mindlessly plow through bad guys and collect loot. This is when I’ll play Torchlight, a DIKU MMO, Kingdom Hearts or even a JRPG like Chrono Trigger or a Final Fantasy. (The bulk of which really does tend to be “grinding” and killing tons of baddies for cash and experience.)

Sometimes I want to explore and take screenshots. I love WoW for this, but Allods Online, LOTRO, RIFT, Portal 2 and many others are great, too. (This is one big problem I have with console gaming; I can’t take screenshots. Yes, it’s possible, I just don’t have the tech.)

Sometimes I want to smash digital stuff. This is when I’ll play Burnout Revenge or Boom Blox, TMNT 2: Turtles in Time or Super Dodgeball… or maybe fire up a fighting game like Soul Calibur, Super Smash Brothers or Marvel vs. Capcom 2, or even River City Ransom as a weird sort of hybrid game.

Sometimes I want grand adventure, and only a journey to Hyrule can scratch the itch.

Sometimes I want a great story with simple game elements, so I’ll dig into something quirky like Ghost Trick (a fantastic little game with a very well-wrought story) or a Phoenix Wright game, or fire up an old Sierra or LucasArts adventure game (currently playing through The Dig, then the Indiana Jones games).

Sometimes I really want to get creative and tinker, so The Incredible Machine or Minecraft are the best.

Sometimes I want a good card game, so I’ll play Magic the Gathering, the WoW TCG, Rook, Rage, SET, the Monopoly card game or even UNO.

Sometimes a board game is best, so I’ll play Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Chess, Mancala, or my new favorite, Blokus.

…and with all of these, there are at least dozens of other games that easily come to mind, but I’m trying to keep it somewhat concise.

There is some overlap, to be sure. The Portal games are both mentally interesting and entertaining. JRPGs sometimes have great stories too. RockSteady’s Batman games are great for exploration, story and fun brawler combat. Blokus is great for flexing puzzle thinking and having fun with my kids.

Still, even with this wide variety, sometimes I just want to play something I’ve played before, that I know I’m good at. This is the “fuzzy slippers gaming” from the title. It’s like that old dog-eared worn out copy of I, Jedi that I read every few years because it’s one of my favorite books. Sometimes, I just want a familiar game to go play for a while, maybe because it’s about revisiting old, cherished memories that are tied to the game. Maybe it’s because I won’t have to think too much. Maybe it’s because I want to share the game with my kids. There’s something valuable about a game that is worth playing again and again.

So, that Star Wars invocation isn’t an accident. What of Star Wars: The Old Republic and the familiarity that it’s perhaps trying to invoke? As Brian Green and others have noted, it’s largely “more of the same”, and can fill that niche of “familiar” for a lot of players. I think there’s value in that, to be sure. Not enough for me to pay anything more than $10 for an always-online game, and certainly not enough for me to pay a subscription for. Also, there’s a distinction between gameplay and the game itself. I’d happily accept a new Miles Edgeworth or Phoenix Wright game because of how they play; that scratches the “familiar” itch while still providing a new story to enjoy. Ditto for a new Professor Layton. Still… I’d get them on sale, simply because if I just wanted the nostalgia, I’d play the older game I already own for free.

Of course, sometimes there are other motivations. I’d buy an English release of Seiken Densetsu 3 because I loved Secret of Mana and want to tell Square that SD3 is a worthy successor. I’d buy a new Chrono game because they dropped the ball by stopping with Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger is incredible. (It was the first game I wanted to make a direct sequel to, and even wrote up some design documents for it.) Sometimes I do want to tell companies that their trendlines are good and to keep up the good work, though with a side order of “keep this trend, but keep experimenting around the edges”. That can be a hard message to send sometimes.

Ultimately, I have other games to scratch that itch for familiar gaming, so I’m not going to buy into a new game that does the same old things but asks a premium for it.

This is also why I strongly resist games that require me to be online to play. I don’t trust that they will always be available, or that I’ll always have a usable internet connection. If the idea is to make me want to go back to play the game, I need to be able to do that on a whim. Similarly, this is why portable games are so great; the low overhead of the DS version of Chrono Trigger means I’ll play it more than my old SNES version or PS1 version, and I played those a lot. The easier it is to just get in and play, the better, if you’re trying to get me to put your game in that “familiarity” slot. Otherwise, I’m going elsewhere.

As for why this is important when I’m not a continuing stream of obvious revenue via a sub, well, I do occasionally buy DLC, and I do talk about and cheerlead for games that I love. I strongly recommend Chrono Trigger, Minecraft, Frozen Synapse, X-Com, Professor Layton, Recettear, Ghost Trick, World of Goo, Cogs and a whole bunch of other great games. Other people have purchased games I’ve recommended. I’ve purchased games other people recommend. If I didn’t have that positive experience with the games, then that free advertising goes away. Maybe it’s hard to quantify that, but there’s value there, and trying to mine it with RealID shenanigans or subs will make it evaporate instantly.

The last thing I want when I go for familiar gaming, my mental Fuzzy Slippers of Comfort +5, is to be hit up for money or a need to login to a server.

I work in the game industry as a technical artist. I’m somewhere between a designer and a “real” artist, and my college degree (Bachelor’s of the Fine Arts) was in computer animation, where I specialized in animation and rigging. I’m sort of a “left and right brain” artist, and I wind up doing a lot of different things in any given production.

In college, I used Autodesk’s Maya for 3D work. It’s a solid, if expensive, program that is used professionally in the film and TV industries. My first job in games used it, too… but now I work at a smaller studio that uses 3DS Max. It’s also a solid, if expensive, program, but three years of using it, and I’m still running into mental and physical tics where I want to use Maya workflow or keyboard/mouse functions that have no parallel in Max or are handled differently.

One particularly egregious dysfunctional keyboard shortcut in Max is the almost omnipresent CTRL-S. In almost every single Windows program that’s the shortcut for “Save”. That’s even true in Max… unless you’re editing UV layouts, which is pretty common in my work. Then, CTRL-S toggles the “Snap” setting. This tripped me up more than once, as I thought I was saving a file, only to find that I was turning Snap on, which messed up what I was doing with the UVs. I’ve also lost work when I thought I saved a file before walking away from my machine, only to have it crash while I was away. My reflexive CTRL-S didn’t save the file, so I was out an hour or so of work.

I consider this to be Bad Design. When user expectations are based on muscle memory and mental habits, there need to be extremely good reasons for going against that grain. That’s not to say that changing things up is always a bad thing, just that it needs to be carefully done and actually make a user’s experience better, not worse.

We see this in game design, too, from the FPS glut to MMOs. So many games look very similar and play very similarly that players come to expect that a new game that fits the mold will offer a similar user experience. This can run as shallow as pressing the same button to advance dialogue trees (a problem between SNES and Playstation era RPGs, where “cancel” was “accept” on the other controller and vice versa) to camera control (games really should let users flip the X and Y axis controls) to actual moment-to-moment gameplay.

I have an XBox game called PURE, an offroad ATV racing/stunt game made for the SSX mentality. It’s full of crazy stunts and absurd tracks, but it’s a lot of fun to play. My wife and I play SSX3 on occasion on our PS2, and we love playing together. PURE doesn’t offer a single-screen multiplayer game, which is a bit annoying, but much more annoying on a subconscious level is that the default controller setup asks the player to hold down the right trigger button to make the silly vehicle move. This winds up making sense as the face buttons (A, B, X, Y) are used for stunts, but going from SSX3, which uses the shoulder button (more or less the same thing as the XBox trigger) for a turbo boost which must be used carefully to the trigger that is almost constantly held is a bit of a jarring transition.

This has nothing to do with how the game itself plays or looks, except inasmuch as those taint player expectations. It’s not a game design issue, it’s a User Interface issue. Yes, that’s part of the overarching “game production” pipeline, but it’s not a function of the core game design (the game mechanics). Good UI design is crucial to making a good game playable, but it’s not something you can just toss a game designer or artist at and hope it works. It requires a bit more thought and study. That not to say that a designer or artist (or programmer) is incapable of good UI design, just that it’s a specialty in itself that needs attention.

Similarly, the Star Trek Online that I’ve been playing lately plays a lot like World of Warcraft in some crucial ways. Holding both left and right mouse buttons down makes a character jog in the direction you’re aiming the camera. Right button dragging moves the camera, left clicking selects targets, right clicking tells your character to attack the target, combat abilities are in a clickable hotbar that can also be activated with the numerical keys on the keyboard. At the same time, ALT-Z doesn’t turn off the UI visual elements that would allow a nice clean screenshot. It’s just a stupid little keyboard shortcut, but I find it annoying every time I want to take a screenshot… and that’s pretty often. STO is a pretty game. Apparently, the UI is automatically turned off for screenshots… but what then if I *want* the UI in the shot? There’s a command for it, but the default function is different from what I’m used to. I’m also not given any sort of feedback to know if hitting the Print Screen button actually takes a screenshot like it does in WoW. That’s not to say that WoW is perfect, just that there’s a difference.

That’s not a problem by any means, it’s just a little annoyance. Those tend to add up, though, even if they are subconscious. Players might find that they aren’t liking a game any more, not because the game itself isn’t good, but because they keep fighting their own reflexes and assumptions about how it’s supposed to work, and that tension is a constant low-level irritation. Something like Star Wars The Old Republic or Guild Wars 2 might find itself in a bad position between wanting to innovate and being stuck with gamers in a mental rut. (That rut may not even be a bad place, for that matter… even if it might hold back the potential of the genre.)

Another example is the vestigial jumping of Wizard 101, which has absolutely no function. It’s purely cosmetic… but because players have come to expect that the space bar makes your character jump in a PC game, by gum, it makes your wizard jump in Wizard 101. As I noted in my original article on it, I think that’s a smart business move, even if it doesn’t make sense within the game itself.

This can also run deeper and run into game design territory. STO has a vague (thankfully not strict) combat trinity of tank/healer/damage dealer with a few tricks thrown in, like WoW or any of a dozen other MMOs. That’s a little odd, but hey, it works for what players are used to, so it makes sense to use it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for the game itself, and almost certainly not for the Star Trek IP, but it makes sense to gamers who might be coming to the game, so it’s a smart move. SWTOR will almost certainly be a “reskin” of WoW with many of the same core mechanics and UI. That’s smart business, even if it isn’t actually anything innovative or even evolutionary. Players don’t want to relearn how to play a game that they are expecting to play like their old favorite.

I’ve also done a bit of web design here and there, and I try to work within the W3 standards. That’s all well and good for practice, but in reality, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and that idiotic Internet Explorer all handle HTML, CSS and even the supposedly-universal Javascript differently. Standards are only useful if they are actually used, and it’s a mess when not only individuals ignore them but also the browsers. Each browser has its strengths and weaknesses, and can be perfectly usable in itself, but when they don’t cooperate on basic usability, it causes users trouble. Standards are incredibly important to communication in all sorts of venues.

By the way, Firefox, why in the world did you move the “home” button to the other side of the address bar? It’s one thing for different programs to change UI, it’s more troubling when a given program changes things between versions. Don’t get me started on Photoshop and its spawn, or the barely-incremental changes we see in other big software packages in an effort to sell a new box each year, not only adding to the cost (since previous versions no longer get sold or supported) but also decreasing usability. That’s not really a good pairing.

But so what? Why does any of this matter?

Well, if your audience is likely to have developed expectations, whether mental habits or actual muscle memory, you need to be aware of that and design your product accordingly. Automobile designers don’t arbitrarily switch the accelerator and brake pedals in an effort to differentiate their cars from the other guys. DVORAK keyboards still aren’t the dominant model. Single-button mice are still a dumb idea for Mac users who may be using PCs during the day. Americans still don’t use the metric system and we drive on the wrong side of the road.

Maybe the alternates are better for those who don’t have expectations, but how often is that truly the case? Designers don’t always have to cater to expectations, but flaunting them in ignorance or spite is a bad way to do business. And perhaps sadly, games are still business. Big business. We need to understand our customers. We still might have the courage or bullheadedness to do things our way instead of the “standard” way, but we shouldn’t do it from a position of ignorance.